Conversion scientists are all the rage in the digital marketing world and as a client it is often easy to get lost in the myriad of questions that flood into the head when you encounter the term CRO. Even for experts within the domain, conversion remains largely a game of test and run. For more often than naught, the conversion scientist is a marketer who makes sweeping assumptions about the markets based on whatever data they have and then change a few variables. Whether the tweaking gets him the best results is all dependent on his skill.

In order to get a better understanding of conversion rate optimization, here are the four questions you should be asking to yourself.

1. How do you define CRO?

This comes right at the top for two particular kinds of people; the clients who are investing in digital marketing and for the newcomer who has just started the road of becoming a digital marketer. In any case, the question itself has multiple different answers depending upon the school of thought you are from.

The most common answer I can think of is by Chris Goward of Wider funnel who spoke of CRO as test practices and tweaking in the variables to find a viable practice. The practice here referred to a particular strategy employed by digital marketers to get more numbers on sales and traffic.

This answer may sound vague to you and that is precisely why this question needs to be asked. For the client who is getting the marketing done, it is often simply about delegating the task without knowing enough about it. That’s a wrong approach right off the bat; get to know what your service provider will be executing as a strategy. Not only does this streamline the process but helps you prioritize your own strategy as well.

2. What Ideas to look at for Testing

If we do go by the convention established for CRO that it is indeed a testing mechanism for ideas and variables to increase traffic or sales then the next logical question has to be this. The problem is that in digital marketing, the variables to play around with are far too many and they vary from industry to industry, niche to niche as you drill down the campaigns. The most common answers you find will talk about:

• Lowering the bounce rate (getting people to stay)
• Increasing the number of clicks on the cart or product check
• Increasing the clicks on certain “read more”

The actual division happens when you find differing trends for different pages within the same website, which can be easily deduced through heat maps.

3. Always go with Data or Innovate

Surprisingly, this is one question that often tricks the best of the best in the game. Again regressively, the previous question can bring you to the point where people are getting stuck but it cannot always tell you how to overcome the obstacle. This is where certain feedback tools like survey optimizers can help you in your CRO. But even with these you cannot always expect total accuracy for removing the said obstacles. Take an example of the fact that a regular customer you see at your store is now shopping elsewhere. One day you ask them “hey why do you not come to buy from me anymore?”

In most cases, the average customer will not directly reply that they do not like your service or the product but will go around the question. The digital marketing stream works similarly, you have to rely intuitively to figure out what it is that you should be correcting in your campaign. Often however, the question matters more because you need to know if the niche outlined has produced accurate enough answers.

4. When to stop testing and re-designing

This is the dreaded question for most clients because if you get the latter as the answer then not only does your marketing halt but you also have to invest in design and development. Time and money!

Does that mean this question is any less important? No! Because often the meter points out that there is nothing more to be gotten out of the website and the page you have been working on. Often the marketing stream works by channel segmentation: it divides the website page by page and form by form then tests bounce rates and clicks on each segment before arriving at a conclusion on the efficacy of the testing. That’s one thought output that Oli Gardener from Unbounce puts out.

Again, if you go for the redesign it will depend upon the factors that will be unique to your website in many ways. Your segmentation, your output and your traffic numbers will vary across different timelines and audiences so as a client it is very important to know when the testing has hit its maxim.

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